10/07/2008 @ 6:09PM

Times To Shutter IHT Site

The New York Times‘ Web site is getting more global, and IHT.com is going bye-bye.

The Times told staff in an internal e-mail Tuesday that the paper’s flagship Web site will soon become host to news from sister paper the International Herald Tribune and that the Tribune‘s site will be shuttered. The move will require “hard decisions about jobs at the IHT,” and the company is now looking to “reassign or relocate people,” according to the memo.

In an interview Tuesday, NYTimes.com General Manager Vivian Schiller insisted that “it’s absolutely, positively not about cost savings.” Rather, it’s about growth, she said.

Schiller hopes tying the sites together will increase the Times‘ traffic–and, significantly for an Internet news business, give it more content against which to sell ads. Schiller also says the move will let the paper better capitalize on the roughly 18% to 20% of traffic coming from foreigners by selling more ads for them.

For better or worse, at least it’s a decision. The IHT site has long been an anachronism in an age where the flagship NYTimes.com was available anywhere in the world. Despite a spirited revamping earlier this decade that gave it a niche among expatriate Americans, Paris-based IHT.com never really got the focus of management in New York or the funding to truly experiment with differentiating itself from the flagship sister site.

As a result, it remained dwarfed and smothered by its larger sibling. NYTimes.com reached roughly 19.4 million unique visitors in August, up year-over-year from just under 8 million. By contrast, comScore reports IHT.com reached 2.5 million unique visitors in August.

News of IHT.com’s demise came on the same day the Times began printing its Sports section at the end of the Business section and mashing its Metro coverage into the A section in an attempt to cut costs. The company claims these moves will not reduce the amount of its coverage.

In August, ad revenue at the New York Times Media Group, including both the Times and Tribune, dropped 15.1% from the same period last year. Internet advertising revenue increased 7.9% for the company’s entire news media group, driven in part by display advertising gains. Still, the company’s overall advertising revenue fell just over 1% between the first and second quarters of the year, from roughly $432.2 million to roughly $427.6 million.

“Early in the year and late last year, they [the New York Times] were among the ‘stronger’ papers, but they were not experiencing some of the double-digit declines that they’re experiencing now,” says Edward Atorino, a newspaper analyst with the Benchmark Co.

So what happens to the print version of the IHT? That’s the next question.